The 69-year-old Hungarian-born Kovacs worked on American B-movies before working on the ground-breaking Easy Rider.

He established his reputation working with the cream of America's 1970s directors including Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich.

Yevtushenko - perhaps best-known for his poem Babi Yar about a 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine - has worked in film, including writing and directing the 1983 film Kindergarten.

Neri is a well-established star with Spanish and Italian directors, but was given her first major Hollywood role in Ridley Scott's Hannibal and also appeared in this year's Arnold Schwarzenegger picture Collateral Damage.

British directors

The festival announced last month that Gong Li would head the jury, but did not announce the full jury list until Monday.

Among the films by British directors in competition are Sam Mendes's Depression-era thriller Road to Perdition and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things.

Stephen Daldry's hotly-anticipated The Hours, featuring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, was pulled from the festival because of delays in post-production.